Ramblings of a partialy sane programmer

Hey everyone, finally got all those W8 issues sorted out. Had to do lots of patching for VS2008 for school and had to disable secure boot ect... to get the UEFI layer to allow the video card to function but all is setup and good to go.

Over the past few days I am been really pondering various aspects of my hobbies. Micro Electronics is really cool but it does not seem to give me the satisfaction I originally intended from it. My goal with the Micro Electronics was to learn development at a very low level. Through various projects and experiments I realize it is really much more about the hardware design and circuits then it is about the low level development. The thing is programming a micro controller really is not programming per say in most common applications it is mostly configuring the internal hardware of the chip to act on various sensory data. The most programming you do is setting some bits and possibly performing a few calculations and that is about it. At least for the cases of what I have been capable off as I am severely limited when it comes to circuitry knowledge. Even from a robotics level it really is nothing more then acting upon the various sensory inputs to make various decision about motor speed and direction.

So through much thought and pondering I think for sure I am going to be getting back into game development as I am not quite sure what I can obtain from micro electronics but I do know what I can obtain from a knowledge perspective with games that could be useful in other applications like data modeling.

Right now I already have 2 game ideas I want to work on that have really been poking and prodding at my brain for the last few years now. One such game should be simple to implement and the other should be a good stepping stone from the first. Both games are 2D as I feel when getting back into this I should start from 2D and once I have the 2 games under my belt then I can consider the move to 3D if it still feels feasible at the time.

In the case of target platform I am not sure at the moment and this will directly effect various technology choices I will have to make. If I choose the PC my options are limitless, however, if I choose mobile I would have to target Windows Phone 8 as that is the device I own currently which I think would be awesome as it is really a great mobile platform. The issue with Windows Phone 8 is I would probably need to find a target API because XNA does not work on windows phone 8 to my knowledge I would need to aim at a API which covers the platform like MonoGame or DirectX.

Also I think there is a fee in order to utilize anything other then the simulator to develop for the windows store but the advantage with targeting this is I can target both Windows 8 and the phone. So this may be the route I take not sure yet.

Any input is appreciated here as I am out of my zone on the Metro/Phone platform as I have always been mainly a C Developer.

So the question is out what do you guys think? Would it be a good choice to target Windows Phone 8 there is a huge open market on these devices for sure and may open options to publish on Xbox in the future as well as Window 8 itself? If so what technologies should I be looking at?

If I do not see too many comments here I will post up in the forums I have been out of the game dev scene for years.